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Liminality, if interpreted as a concern with borders and states of in-betweenness, is a widespread theme in Irish literature and culture, which is perhaps not surprising considering the colonial and postcolonial background of Ireland. The liminal, from the Latin word limen , meaning "a threshold", can be broadly defined as a transitional place of becoming. It is a borderland state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, leading those who participate in the process to new perspectives and possibilities.
This collection of essays examines the theme of liminality in Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity and focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts. The book is divided into four sections. The first part deals with theoretical aspects of liminal states. Other sections focus on liminal narratives and explore drama as liminal rites of passage, while the last part examines transformative spaces in contemporary Irish women's poetry.
List of contents
Contents: Irene Gilsenan Nordin/Elin Holmsten: Introduction: Borders and States of In-Betweenness in Irish Literature and Culture - Michael G. O'Sullivan: Limning the Liminal, Thinking the Threshold: Irish Studies' Approach to Theory - Cheryl Temple Herr: Images of Migration in Irish Film: Thinking Inside the Box - Heidi Hansson: History in/of the Borderlands: Emily Lawless and the Story of Ireland - Susan Cahill: "'The Other' that Moves and Misleads": Mapping and Temporality in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's The Dancer's Dancing - Lotta Palmerstierna Einarsson: Movement as Text, Text as Movement: The Choreographic Writing of Samuel Beckett - Róisín O'Gorman: Caught in the Liminal: Dorothy Cross's Udder Series and Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats... - Katarzyna Poloczek: Identity as Becoming: Polymorphic Female Identities in the Poetry of Boland, Meehan and Ní Dhomhnaill - Michaela Schrage-Früh: "So Much Psychic Land [...] to Reclaim": Otherworldly Encounters in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's Poetry - Maryna Romanets: The (Translato)logic of Spectrality: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Her English Doubles.
About the author
The Editors: Irene Gilsenan Nordin is Associate Professor of English at Dalarna University, Sweden. She is Director of the Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies and the literary editor of
Nordic Irish Studies.
Elin Holmsten is Assistant Professor of English at Dalarna University, Sweden. She completed her thesis
The Hermeneutics of Otherness in Medbh McGuckian's Poetry at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2006.
